Inside the brain chemistry of F1 high performance

When McLaren team principal Andrea Stella explained the factors behind Lando Norris failing to win last weekend's Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix, it was layered with nuance. This wasn’t just a case of not pitting on a certain lap to avoid the undercut, he said, but a combination of different inputs including the in-lap and time lost in the pitlane itself.

As with China, when neither Norris nor team-mate Oscar Piastri was able to start the grand prix, there was no thundering from the pulpit, no finger-jabbing, just a reflective meditation on the importance of learning productively from events.

“I think what we have gone through at McLaren in terms of the journey from 2023 has been such a good journey of developing a culture, a mindset, what we call internally a winner's mindset,” Stella said in China. “Just a positive attitude, which focuses us on what we can control. In this case today, there wasn't much we could have controlled. So we just take any possible learning and we go again.

“And we say, even looking at last year, when we won the double championship, we said, and I said that publicly, but we definitely said internally, the victory was not in Abu Dhabi. The victory was in Qatar and in Vegas, for the way we withstood the difficulties. That's where you really become a champion.”

Dr Marcia Goddard left the world of academia to become a business consultant, aiming to demonstrate how neuroscience can build high-performance cultures. As a self-confessed F1 ‘superfan’, she naturally found the business of grand prix racing an irresistible source of examples.

She has now written a book, Driving Performance: 10 Lessons About Building High-Performing Teams From Neuroscience and Formula One, codifying those lessons with input from fellow Autosport columnist Pat Symonds.

Dr Marcia Goddard

Photo by: Autosport

Autosport: Your book is different from a lot of the genre of high-performance lessons and management, because I find very often those books can be dry, a little bit condescending, and steeped in management and MBA speak. And while your book has some shared furniture with those - bullet points, lists and stuff like that - it's actually very punchy and opinionated. I was wondering how much of that is your personality and just your way of doing things, and how much is your background in science and knowing that sort of language presses the button and gets the right response from the brain of the reader?

Marcia Goddard: I didn’t want to write another one of those books, because there's about 50,000 of them already. I think what you're reading is my passion for this sport. I talk about this because, firstly, I genuinely do think there's a lot that we can learn from it, but the way I've written it is the way I've always felt science communication has to be.

Before I started my own company, I was in academia, and I always had discussions with professors. I wanted to go out there, and I wanted to sort of translate what we were doing so that people would actually understand it. And they were like, “No, no, just write your scientific papers.”

Seriously, scientific papers are impossible to read.

So that's something that I've always been very passionate about, and then when I wrote this book, I just got really excited. So the way I write is the way I speak as well. It’s not something I do on purpose because I think it'll work - it's something I do because I would want to read it that way as well.

AS: Can you explain a little bit more about the science of neuroscience? Because I'm fascinated to know how we establish which parts of the brain performs what tasks. A little bit like the recent furore in F1 over engine compression ratios, how do you analyse it when it's running?

MG: That's how it started, right? We could only look at dead people. So we would cut them open and look at their brains.

And then we'd have to make a lot of assumptions about how the brain operates. But for example, my work during my PhD, I used MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] scans. These are the best ways we have right now to understand how the brain operates.

There's MRI, which is just kind of like taking a static picture of the brain in one moment in time, this is what the brain looks like. And then there's fMRI, functional MRI, which allows us to look at the brain, and then to measure as people are doing a task – measure the energy that goes to different brain areas.

So then we know that brain area is involved in that specific action. That's how we learn things about empathy, about mental health, about all sorts of neurological conditions. We now have a better understanding of which brain areas light up with which activities.

One little caveat – we do make some assumptions about fMRI, as in, we think that when brain areas become active, they use more glucose and more energy goes there. If it turns out that that's wrong, then we can throw away all of that research - but that's how science operates anyway.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls

Photo by: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images

AS: You say that it's not a book about hustle culture, that you don't necessarily achieve high performance by working 4am till 11 at night and that sort of thing. Are you consciously pushing back at the kind of performative nonsense you see in LinkedIn posts – “I got up at 4am, had a micronutrient shake, went to the gym and listened to a podcast, then meditated before two hours of focused work” and that sort of thing?

MG: You know what, if people want to do that, that is absolutely fantastic, good for them.

But that is not the only way to be a high performer. Some people operate that way, which is fine, if that's how they operate. But true high performance is not about pushing harder, it's not about putting in more hours, it is about designing environments that work with the brain, instead of against it.

If you feel like you have to do it, but you don't naturally feel like you enjoy doing it, or it works for you, you're working against the natural functioning of your brain. True sustainable high performance in Formula 1 is about figuring out on the group level when you work with a team, because that's what we're talking about here.

How does this team operate? What is the natural cadence of this team? And what are the elements of the environment, like psychological safety, like autonomy, like trusting, interpersonal trust, those are the things that will allow people to deal with setbacks, and to deal with the peaks and the troughs.

I'm not saying that putting in 80 hours a week by definition is bad. It's just not good for you if you do it consistently. And understanding that, and understanding how the brain can then reset and recover, so that you can keep going for 20-30 years, that's what true high performance is about.

AS: I was fascinated by the concept of having mental gates and structures where you actually tell the brain that a task is complete, and that stops all the stress hormones.

MG: It's about closure, yeah. The brain likes to put things in boxes. That's what the brain likes the most. Because if something is a habit, then the brain doesn't have to spend too much energy on it.

But if you're learning something new, which both in F1 as well as in the corporate world is happening a lot right now, because the world is changing so quickly, we have to spend a lot of energy on that.

And you want to do that in the most efficient way possible, making sure that the brain has closure. You finish one thing before you start the next thing. That just prevents the brain from going like, ‘Oh, I have 50 different priorities. I don't know what to do anymore.’ Because then the most important brain area that we have, the amygdala, when that happens, when we have 50 priorities and none of them are closed, it will switch on and it'll produce a stress response.

And again, not necessarily bad if it happens once or twice, but it becomes a big problem if that is chronic, if it is consistent. And designing an environment that has all the elements that I talk about – the autonomy, the trust, the psychological safety, the shared purpose, those are all things that help keep the brain in the right frame of mind, in the right interpretation of all of those things so that you can get the most out of yourself and out of your team.

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Photo by: Alex Bierens de Haan / Getty Images

 AS: What's been going through your mind while you've been following developments regarding the 2026 regulations? It must be quite fascinating for you professionally to see how the engineers have been very pragmatic and viewed it as a problem-solving exercise. Whereas many other people, including the drivers, have approached it the other way – as you say in the book regarding other topics, there’s that defensive response by the brain to assume that it's not going to go well.

MG: That is exactly it. That's the safest thing for the brain to do. And I'm sure there have also been engineers who were like, ‘this is crap, and I can't do this’, which is fine. That's not necessarily a bad thing. You can go through that. When a change happens, and you're not happy with the change, it's OK to say that.

It's not about pushing away those emotions, but it is about then channeling them into something that is productive. And I think that's where engineers in F1 really excel. Maybe engineers were frustrated in the beginning. But what I love about the people that work in this industry is that they then go, ‘OK, if this is what it is, let's go, let's do it.’

Pardon the language, but it’s a let’s-get-shit-done mentality – and I really love that in them.

AS: In terms of systems, autonomy and structure within a team, you chose a powerful example in what happened after Max Verstappen crashed on the way to the grid in the 2020 Hungarian Grand Prix. The team principal asks if it’s possible to fix the car on the grid, the sporting director says yes, and they just make it happen.

MG: I love that. I use that example a lot when I speak on these things with companies, because I think Hungary 2020 and what Red Bull did there is the perfect example of what you can accomplish if you just give people the trust and the autonomy to do it.

Let them go. Let them do their thing. Because on paper, that was impossible. It was not supposed to be successful. And it was because they ended up on the podium. I love that example.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16 celebrates with team members

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

AS: What interests you about the psychology of drivers? There seems to be a lot of cognitive dissonance involved when things don’t go their way. Especially when they aren't as fast as their teammates, they find ways of selling it to themselves. What’s the science behind that?

MG: They have to. In F1, if you don't believe that you are the fastest driver on the grid, you might as well stay home.

Deep down, maybe when their careers are over, they might look back and think, ‘OK, maybe he was a little better than I was.’ But when you're in it, you have to believe you’re the fastest driver on the grid. Because otherwise the inner drive and motivation is going to fizzle out.

What I find most fascinating about successful drivers in F1 is that they’re able to balance their emotions. They can translate frustration and anger into performance, that emotion regulation that they have, and that internal locus of control, really believing that I am in control of what happens to me.

Those are the two things, if I had to choose two things about driver mindset that are most important, it would be regulating emotions, and having an internal locus of control where you believe that what you do actually influences the outcome.

AS: To what extent is that a characteristic that can be learned or developed via neuroplasticity?

MG: Both of them. Completely, completely trainable. Most drivers have performance coaches, who will address some of these things with them. It's trainable, but it requires you to reflect.

So they need to have the right environment. Not media interviews, that’s not exactly a safe space, because every word is going to be amplified on social media. They need to have a space away from all of that, whether it's with a coach or with a family member or someone on the team that they trust, where they can be completely open and reflective, and be honest about how they are feeling if they have to push it back.

Two or three years ago I interviewed Nico Rosberg, and he talked a lot about anxiety that he had in the car. But he couldn't be open about that, because he said Michael Schumacher, his team-mate, would eat him for breakfast if he was open about his  fears.

So I think having that safe space to discuss these things is the way forward to be able to build the skills that you need to succeed and to keep winning.

Nico Rosberg, Mercedes AMG, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, and Michael Schumacher, Mercedes AMG, in the post qualifying Press Conference

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

AS: Is having that safe space also useful elsewhere? You have a chapter on no-blame culture, but at some point, when a team is reviewing a race and looking at elements such as the quality of decision-making in the strategy, if someone has done something wrong they need to own it, even if no one's pointing fingers.

MG: But they will. They will if they know that they are safe. Safety is not about no accountability. Safety is about knowing, ‘If I actually own up to this, if I own up to making this mistake, I'm going to be okay. We're going to learn from this, and we're going to move forward.’

It's not about repeating mistakes, right? You have to learn from them. But the only way to do that, and the only way for people to take accountability and ownership of their mistakes, is if they know that their jobs and their reputations are safe if they speak up. That's why the no-blame philosophy and psychological safety come first.

You can't force people to be open if you don't have that in place. But once you have that, people will open up, because then the brain will be like, ‘Yeah, it's fine. We actually can learn here.’ And then they will start speaking about it, and that's actually how learning velocity, the speed of learning, actually increases if you have an environment like that.

AS: How much more have you learned about your field, and also about Formula 1, in writing a book as opposed to posting on the web?

MG: It reiterated for me why I love this sport so much, and why for the past 10 years I've been so driven to really make that connection between this is how F1 operates, and this is how corporations operate, and this is what they can learn from each other.

Basically it's forced me to be structured in how I write it down, which is always good – because on, say, LinkedIn, it's like I can write whatever I want, and it's a bit all over the place. Writing a book steers you into that structure of picking which example goes where, and that has taught me a lot about the specifics of how the teams operate.

Through the research I already knew a lot of it, but it was reinforced by writing it in book form – and it just confirmed for me that there is a lot to learn from looking more into how F1 teams operate.

Driving Performance: 10 Lessons About Building High-Performing Teams From Neuroscience and Formula One is out now